A Deadly Education (Scholomance #1) - Naomi Novik Page 0,92
only three years past the sell-by date. Liu got a bag of salted licorice, which is inexpressibly vile but you can swap it with the Scandinavian kids for almost anything, another packet of crisps, and a slightly questionable box of cured meat. Aadhya got a small packet of halvah, a completely fresh salmon onigiri dated this very morning, amazing, and a whole tin of chestnut spread so large it clanged the whole machine when it came down.
“Let me try and get something to put it on,” I said, and put in another token: when you use a token you’ve saved for a while, usually you get something particularly good or particularly bad. This time I was in luck: out came the glorious orange plastic of a packet of Hobnobs.
We got our little paper cups of tea and coffee from the lukewarm urns and went back to Aadhya’s room to share the lot. She had tapped the gas line of her room lamp to build herself a little Bunsen burner, which we used to boil the meat in an alchemy beaker while we wolfed down the onigiri, and then ate Hobnobs slathered with chestnut spread and topped with halvah and crushed peanut butter crackers. When the meat had cooked long enough, we ate it with the crisps, a feast finished off with celebratory slices of Mars bar. Aadhya sat at the desk, working on the belly of her lute, and Liu and I sat on the bed and worked on our papers.
We didn’t talk very much: none of us had time to waste. But we’d said enough, and shaken hands. While the meat had been cooking, I’d gone to my room and come back with crystals for each of them. After we finished the food and it was getting on a bit, I began on my mana-building crochet, and Liu sat down on the floor and did yoga. Aadhya did sudoku puzzles. When the first bell rang, we went to the bathroom together, and after we had our wash, we went to the stretch of wall between the boys’ and girls’ bathrooms and wrote our three names there together: Liu wrote our names down in Chinese characters, and I did us in Hindi and English. We weren’t the absolute first set, but close to it: there were only three other alliances already written up, nobody I knew. On our way back, Liu waited by her door until I got to mine, we both waited until Aadhya was at hers, too, and we waved to each other before we went inside to bed.
I slept really well. I don’t usually remember dreams, which is probably for the best all things considered, but that morning I woke up just before the bell and while I was lying there in bed I had a vague half dream of Mum sitting in the woods looking at me worried. I said out loud, “It’s all right. I’m all right, Mum, I’m not joining an enclave. You were right,” and I didn’t even mind saying it, because I didn’t want her to be worried, and she was still worried, reaching out to me with her mouth moving silently, trying to say something. “Mum, I have friends. Aadhya and Liu and Orion. I have friends,” and in the dream my eyes were blurry and I was smiling, and I woke up still smiling. It’s supposed to be impossible to communicate with anyone inside the Scholomance, because if message spells could get through, so could some kinds of mals, so I wasn’t sure if I’d really seen Mum, but I hoped so. I wanted her to know.
It’s not that I was suddenly in charity with the whole world or anything. I saw Chloe coming out of her room as I went back to mine after washing up, and I did manage to get angry again. Orion wasn’t at the meeting point, and Ibrahim said he hadn’t seen him in the boys’ that morning, either. I had been absolutely determined that I was never going to wait for him, but with indignation hot in my belly, I said, “Save us two seats, all right?” to Aadhya and Liu, and I went and banged on his door, loudly. I did it once more before I got back the sound of some thumping around, and he opened it without the slightest precaution, shirtless and with his hair sticking up, to blink at me bleary and haggard.